Why Congress must fully fund waterway projects

On Feb. 17, Vice President Joe Biden visited the Port of New Orleans to celebrate the seven-year anniversary of the economic stimulus and to tout its benefits to the port.

“We’re going to continue to push to grow America [and] continue to insist on the United States of America having the most modern infrastructure in the world,” Biden declared.

Traditionally, when politicians promote the importance of infrastructure investment, they focus on roads, runways and bridges. Biden’s speech was a rare occasion when a politician paid attention to U.S. waterways, which are a crucial artery for U.S. goods to reach the world.

But despite Biden’s words, there is a significant disconnect between this shiny vision and the Obama administration’s proposed budget for investing in ports and inland waterways. This lack of funding would delay badly needed upgrades for locks and dams around the country, leading to more emergency shutdowns that clog waterways and impact shipping. The White House needs to listen to Biden carefully: When assessing the nation’s freight transportation needs, rivers must not be forgotten.

The United States is home to 12,000 navigable miles of waterways that create a powerful, interconnected web across the nation, enabling American companies to easily ship “building block” commodities like grain and petroleum products long distances. For centuries, the rivers have been a vital lifeline for farmers and manufacturers to get their goods to market. In the 21st century, they keep these shippers, and others, competitive in tough global markets.

Our inland waterways system is often out of sight, but it is a critical link in the transportation supply chain, making our goods cheaper and providing middle-class jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans. In 2014, 604 million tons of goods valued at $232 billion traveled on our inland waterways system. Shippers, and ultimately consumers, save $20.37 per ton of cargo compared to other modes of transportation, or $12.3 billion annually. The inland waterways support about 541,000 jobs, worth more than $29 billion to the U.S. economy. The employee safety record for inland operators is 18 times better than rail and a whopping 132 times safer than truck, based on ton-miles moved. With new investments, our rivers could support an additional 10,000 to 15,000 of these jobs just in the construction sector alone.

The inland water system also helps keep American highways less congested. Towboats transport commodities in tows, which consist of a group of 15 to 30 barges lashed together that can be as large as a football field. One 15-barge dry cargo tow is equal to 1,050 trucks on our nation’s highways. For some context, one barge load of wheat could produce 2.5 million loaves. Petroleum products like gasoline are carried in even larger barges — and just one liquid tank barge can hold enough gas to keep about 2,500 cars running for an entire year.

In addition, barge transport is the most fuel-efficient form of surface transportation, able to move cargo more than four times further than trucks on just one gallon of fuel. This minimizes the impact on the environment because towboats and barges have the cleanest emissions rate of cargo per ton-mile among all surface modes.

But despite the promises of America’s waterways, the government has fallen short on maintaining them, putting all of those benefits at risk. Locks and dams on our nation’s river system, which were first built during the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were designed for a 50-year lifespan. Many have exceeded this by decades and require recapitalization. If — and when — a major lock fails, important products, such as grain, petroleum and coal, bound for use domestically and for export, will sit idle. For example, the Charleroi lock in Pittsburgh opened in 1932, and a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ study found that if this lock fails, it would cause $1 billion in economic damage to Western Pennsylvania. Multiplied on a national scale, the potential economic damage from our aging waterways infrastructure is significant.

In addition, due to lack of funding, the Corps of Engineers, which maintains the locks and dams, now must operate on a “fix as fail” basis. This means the Corps cannot do preventative maintenance and has no spare parts when things break. Barges moving commodities must endure months of delays when there are emergency closures; consumers ultimately pay higher costs; and thousands more trucks congest our highways when products must be diverted to other modes.

The Panama Canal expansion could provide untold opportunities for more products to move on the inland system. But without properly dredged channels for those commodities to reach export ports, squandered opportunities — not robust trade balances — will be the reality.

Despite its importance, inland waterways funding and maintenance budgets historically have been woefully inadequate — and, if the administration has its way, those funds will decrease significantly. In the fiscal 2016 budget, Congress funded the Army Corps of Engineers’ Civil Works Mission, which maintains waterways in the U.S., at near-record levels, with $5.989 billion. That budget was a welcome sign that Congress recognizes there is a backlog of waterways projects that must be addressed.

But the president proposed cutting the Civil Works Mission’s funding by nearly 23 percent in fiscal 2017, to $4.620 billion. For ports, the president requested $989 million from the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, down from the $1.21 billion in the last fiscal year. In fact, the Trust Fund collects about $1.6 billion annually from a tax on the value of imported goods, but instead of using that money to fund operations and maintenance of deep draft and coastal waterways, as it was originally designed to do, it has been used for deficit reduction or general funds programs. The president’s budget request would only continue this damaging trend.

The budget request also proposes to halt construction at three modernization projects, laying off hundreds of building trades workers. At current funding levels, it would take nearly seven decades to complete 23 planned “priority” projects across the system, many already under construction, at a total cost of about $8 billion.

This disregard for our waterways is unacceptable. The U.S.’s vast transportation and port system is the reason we have prospered economically and continue to lead the world. Rivers allows America’s critical commodities of grain, coal, agricultural inputs, steel, petroleum products, chemicals and aggregate materials to be used domestically and to reach the export market in the most cost-competitive way. We cannot allow our ports, dams and locks to slowly deteriorate and squander this quintessential American advantage.

In his speech at the Port of New Orleans, Biden recognized the importance of our waterways. “Freight shipments are expect to increase another 62 percent, well over 110 million tons per day in the next two decades,” he said, adding that the inland waterways stretch across 36 states and generate “hundreds of billions of dollars of growth and capital.”

Sadly, Biden’s recognition of our waterways has not extended to the White House. Rather than continually cutting funding for our waterways, we must invest in the transportation infrastructure that built the foundation for our nation’s success. When seeking transportation freight solutions, there is no better way than through the inland waterways.